Last Summer: A Novel Page 25

  “It wouldn’t have changed my mind about marrying you and staying with you if you did.”

  “Speaking of minds. Do you want your memories back? You mentioned last week you didn’t.”

  Ella thinks for a moment, tapping her lips. “Let me see if I have this straight. We go to the Maldives and I tell you that I want to start a family. But you don’t tell me you’re sterile, only that you still don’t want kids. Right?” She waits for Damien’s confirmation and, when he nods, says, “We return home, I go on assignment with Nathan, and you fly to London. I meet up with you two weeks later and several weeks after that realize I’m pregnant. I believe Simon is yours, and you let me think that. Then, for whatever reason—guilt maybe?—you tell me you’re sterile, that you’re not Simon’s father, and that you know I had an affair. This happens on the day of my accident. After dinner, I guess. So far, so good?” He nods again. “We then argue. Upset, I leave the condo, where I call Nathan, presumably to tell him about Simon, but I never get the chance. A truck hits me. And, well . . . we know what happens next.”

  Damien’s jaw ticks.

  “Did I get it right?” She looks at him expectantly. His expression is tight and his eyes reflect all the pain she’s caused them. But he nods.

  “Yes, that’s how it happened.”

  “Then, no. I don’t want my memories.” She’ll miss not having the opportunity to experience the maternal connection with Simon, but she doesn’t want to remember her affair with Nathan, the first one, or the hurt she inflicted on Damien.

  The pain recedes in his eyes and he smiles, a wide satisfied grin. Ella would say his smile almost looks calculating, but that wouldn’t make sense. Her vision is blurry through her tears and distorting everything in the room. Damien’s just happy. Super happy they’ve worked through everything, because he pulls her into his arms and kisses her deeply.

  “I love you,” he murmurs against her lips. “I love you so much.”

  When he lifts his head and smiles adoringly at her, she catches the time on the clock. It’s almost six o’clock.

  “You have to get to the airport,” she says, sad he has to leave.

  “Or”—he grabs her wrist when she moves toward the door—“I can cancel my flight. And tomorrow’s meeting. There’s a big bed here, just waiting.” He smiles that sexy, wide grin that always makes her breath catch.

  “You’d do that for me? Cancel your meeting?”

  Damien draws her to him until their bodies are flush. He brushes his lips over hers. “I’d do anything to keep you happy, Ella.”

  CHAPTER 35

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT

  August 18, 2018

  Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, CA

  Interviewer: Ella Skye, Senior Features Writer, Luxe Avenue magazine

  Interviewee: Amira Silvers, Academy Award–winning Actress

  [Continuation of Recording]

  Ella: For the record, you’ve agreed to share with Luxe Avenue’s readers what you were going to tell me a moment ago. You said that you know how to forget your husband. So let’s pick up where we left off. What do you mean by that? How do you forget Harry? Are you saying you can completely wipe him from your mind? Is that even possible?

  Amira: Have you heard of a Dr. Irwin Whitely?

  Ella: No.

  Amira: He’s a cognitive scientist. He’s conducting research on memory retrieval and suppression. Specifically, motivated forgetting.

  Ella: What’s that?

  Amira: It’s the deliberate suppression of memories. Dr. Sigmund Freud theorized it. Dr. Whitely has discovered how to do it.

  Ella: Really? Sounds fascinating.

  Amira: Quite. He’s looking for more test subjects. I met with him last week. He offered to work with me.

  Ella: Are you going to?

  Amira: I think so. What about you, Ella? If you could intentionally forget someone, would you?

  Ella: Umm . . . I’m not sure.

  Amira: What if the person had harmed you?

  [Pause]

  Amira: Let me rephrase. What about something you did that hurt someone else, something you regret? Imagine the guilt you feel. Imagine eliminating that guilt like this. [Sound of finger snap] Would you block what you did from your memory?

  [Pause]

  Ella: I’m pregnant.

  Amira: Congratulations. How far along?

  Ella: Five weeks. I just found out.

  Amira: Does your husband know?

  Ella: Yes, of course. He’s ecstatic. We both are, but . . .

  Amira: But?

  Ella: Never mind. I shouldn’t have said anything.

  Amira: Why not? Is something wrong with the baby?

  Ella: No, not that. It’s . . .

  [Pause]

  Amira: It’s what?

  Amira: You can tell me. Ella, darling, there’s no one in this room but you and me. Nothing we say gets out that door unless you decide to publish it.

  [Pause]

  Ella: My husband isn’t the father.

  Amira: Does he know?

  Ella: Yes. He’s okay with it. More than okay, surprisingly.

  Amira: Interesting. What about the baby’s biological father? Does he know?

  Ella: No.

  [Pause]

  Amira: You aren’t going to tell him.

  Ella: My husband doesn’t want me to. I agreed not to at first, but now . . . I don’t know.

  Amira: You feel guilty keeping your pregnancy from the father.

  Ella: Yes. How did you put it? Guilt. It’s the devil.

  Amira: Mm-hmm. It is. Do you wish you could forget that you told your husband the baby isn’t his?

  Ella: No. Not that. The opposite.

  [Pause]

  Amira: [Gasp] You want to forget that the baby isn’t your husband’s.

  Ella: Yes.

  Amira: [Low laughter] My, oh my. That is something.

  Ella: You don’t even know the half of it.

  Amira: There’s more? Do tell.

  Ella: [Expletive]

  Amira: What is it?

  Ella: We’re still recording.

  [End Recording]

  CHAPTER 36

  Six Weeks Later

  Late May 2019

  Damien sits in his office chair in PDN’s San Francisco headquarters. He faces the window that overlooks the murky gray water. The Bay Bridge sprawls below, grappling the shores like an Olympic gymnast doing the splits. On the other side of the bridge, planes take off from the Oakland Airport. They lift into the sky, disappearing into low-lying clouds.

  In his hand, he flips a flash drive end over end. A backup to the drive he gave Ella. He always keeps a second copy. It’s the nature of his business. Files can crash and data can corrupt in a snap. One string of bad code can erase a lifetime’s worth of work. Ella’s motivated forgetting was not part of their original plan, the one they devised last summer when she first received the Nathan Donovan assignment on their return from the Maldives.

  If there’s anything Damien regrets happening on their trip, it’s telling Ella about his issue. Unlike what he told her when she got back from Alaska, he had actually revealed his sterility when they were in the Maldives. He told her in a heated reaction to Ella’s own confession: she’d admitted that she always wanted kids. She’d forgotten to pack her birth control and thought it would be a good time to try to have a baby. They’d been married for a while. She’d thought maybe, by then, he might be open to the idea. Maybe he’d want to start a family.

  Ella had blindsided him. He had no idea she wanted children.

  He should have confessed he couldn’t give her any before they married. He should have stuck with his usual refrain: he didn’t want kids. Because as soon as the confession about his sterility left his mouth, he regretted it. Ella would leave him, just like Anna had.

  To his surprise, she didn’t. Yes, she was angry he didn’t tell her—she felt betrayed. She also didn’t speak to him for two days. The longest two days
of his life. But she came around, and better yet, she was understanding. She was open to adopting, or they could foster. They could also find a donor. There are a million ways to have a baby, she had said.

  A million ways.

  And the best way for them came in the form of Nathan Donovan.

  Damien’s plan was spontaneous, but his wife was on board and it had worked. Perfectly. That was, until Ella let the guilt over what they’d done consume her. Because something had happened while on assignment that neither Ella nor he could have predicted: Ella had fallen in love with Nathan. And after everything he’d been through with Carson, after she found out she was pregnant with Nathan’s son, she felt they could no longer deceive him. Nathan had a right to know he was going to be a father.

  Damien adamantly disagreed. Nathan could never know the truth. If he did, Simon would no longer belong to Damien and Ella. Nathan would be a part of their family, too. They argued for months until everything came to a head that fateful November evening. Damien distinctly remembers how, after a dinner of pork loin and rice pilaf, Ella said she planned to call Nathan, how she grabbed her car keys and slammed their front door in his face. Then everything changed. The accident. Her emergency C-section. Simon’s death. Nathan’s audacity to show up at the hospital a few days later and insist on the truth. Was he Simon’s biological father?

  That night after the hospital staff forcibly removed Nathan, Ella, devastated and racked with guilt, confessed the last thing Damien ever expected to hear from her. She still loved him, but she also loved Nathan.

  Ella knew she had to choose, and thankfully, his wife chose him. She then proposed her own plan. She’d intentionally forget Nathan and everything she felt for him, and she knew how to do that. It was the only way she believed they could truly start over.

  Damien did what any loving husband would do to help his wife. He went along with her plan. He did what she asked of him. He wouldn’t answer her questions about the seven months leading up to the accident, no matter how hard she pressed. He would misdirect and mislead anytime she got close. He would scrub her phone, laptop, and cloud accounts. He even took it one step further on his own and wiped Rebecca’s and Nathan’s servers of their email exchanges with Ella.

  At first, he didn’t believe Ella when she told him that she couldn’t remember the pregnancy or accident. He had a hard time believing Dr. Whitely’s methods would work. But when it became evident she didn’t recall his sterility, their argument in the Maldives, or the plan they came up with last summer either, he saw a new opportunity, especially when he noticed that she didn’t start back up on birth control after her miscarriage. His wife wanted a baby, and he was determined to give her one. This new plan was his gift to her.

  Men like Nathan Donovan are predictable. Damien knew Nathan wouldn’t give up until he had Ella’s confession about Simon’s parentage. He’d be back. And it only took hacking into Luxe Avenue’s email server and sending one email to Nathan from Rebecca’s assistant’s email address for him to show up. It took Nathan over a month to reply, but when he did, all Damien had to do next was lure his unsuspecting wife back into Nathan’s bed. Ella could finally get what she’d been wanting most, and Damien would get Ella’s lifetime loyalty and devotion. He’d keep her happy.

  This time, though, they’d do things differently. By forcing Ella to choose him over Nathan and capitalizing on the guilt Ella would feel from cheating on him, not once but twice, as he let her believe, there was no way in hell, no matter the circumstances, Ella would risk betraying Damien a third time.

  Damien can all but guarantee Nathan Donovan is—once and for all—out of the picture. Because Damien Russell doesn’t share.

  Damien spins his chair to face his desk. He plugs the drive into his computer. A new window opens on his monitor, displaying 2,084 files, exactly two more files than were on the drive he gave Ella. Damien ensured that drive didn’t include one of the nine transcription files from her interview with Amira Silvers, where Ella confessed their plan. How disloyal of her. It also didn’t include the code for Ella to unblock her memories. The code, Ella once explained to him, that is as unique as the individual’s mind it’s programmed into.

  He doesn’t want her to remember last summer’s plan or how guilty she felt about it, else she’d be inclined to confess to Nathan—again—and invite him back into their lives. He especially doesn’t want her to remember what it felt like to love Nathan. That’s why, this time, Ella needed to believe she didn’t wrong Nathan. Rather, she cheated on Damien. She needed to believe she’s the one at fault. She betrayed him, twice. Guilt will keep her by his side.

  See? Loyalty and devotion.

  He also doesn’t want her to suspect how he took advantage of her memory loss. The internal investigation over CyberSeal’s meddling with PDN’s trade secrets and client list? It couldn’t have happened at a better time. It kept him distanced and made him appear distracted. Ella would have no choice but to seek answers elsewhere. She’d look to get them from Nathan. Because Ella is as ruthless in her pursuit of a story, even if it’s her own, as Damien is with a deal. That’s why they make the perfect team.

  Does he feel guilty letting her believe events unfolded the way she thinks they did? Not at all. If he felt any remorse about any of the decisions he’s made or strategies he’s devised and implemented, he wouldn’t be where he is today: CEO of a top-ten private cybersecurity firm. Husband to a gorgeous, intelligent, and passionate woman. And soon, a father.

  Damien erases the files on the drive and shuts down his computer. He shoulders his jacket, tugs down the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, and straightens his tie. He picks up his biometric briefcase and heads home. His pregnant wife is waiting for him.

  CHAPTER 37

  Last Summer

  The Plan

  Damien strides into Ella’s office with two steaming mugs of Ethiopian blend. Setting one down within her reach, he leans a hip on her desk and studies her intently. He’s been doing that a lot since they returned from vacation, as if trying to anticipate her next move so that he can counter or assist. She knows that he still expects her to leave him. Just like Anna.

  “What are you working on?” he asks eventually.

  Ella clicks through photos of Nathan Donovan, landing on a headshot from early in his career.

  “Rebecca called with a new assignment.”

  “Nathan Donovan? Isn’t he that survivalist guy?”

  “Yes and yes. It’ll be a cover feature, for sure. Rebecca wants me to spend five days with him.”

  “Five days,” Damien repeats in a flat tone.

  He doesn’t want her to leave, not with things unsettled between them.

  “I think the time apart will be good for us,” Ella says quietly. A needed distraction from how messed up their marriage has become. She and Damien could use the distance to think and regroup. To decide if adoption, fostering, or a sperm bank is in their future. Unless their marriage is destined to be childless.

  Ella’s mouth flattens to a grim line. She rapidly clicks through images. Even if they didn’t need the time apart, there’s no way Ella’s passing up this assignment. It could be the pinnacle of her career.

  Ella lands on a recent headshot. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t attracted to Nathan. His ice-blue eyes stare back at her. “He looks like you,” she remarks to her husband.

  “You think so?”

  Damien comes to stand behind Ella. He drops a hand on her shoulder and leans forward to peer at the monitor.

  Ella clicks to the next photo. Nathan decked out in a three-piece suit at a charity auction several years back. “You could pass as brothers.”

  Damien makes a contemplative noise in the back of his throat and straightens.

  “What?” she asks.

  He doesn’t share his thoughts, not right away. His finger strokes the side of his nose as he studies Nathan’s image. Ella turns back to the screen and clicks through more pictures.

  “Are you st
ill off birth control?”

  A sharp intake of breath fills Ella’s lungs. She doesn’t have to ask why he wants to know. She knows how her husband thinks, what he’s thinking. The meaning of his question is clear.

  He wants Nathan Donovan to donate his sperm.

  Shocked, her mouth falls open. “You aren’t seriously . . . you want me to ask him . . . ?” But even as she sputters to get out the question, the idea takes root in her head. And it’s damn brilliant.

  They can avoid the hassle of searching for a perfect match through sperm banks because Nathan already is one. Not only does he resemble her husband, but he’s intelligent and athletic. An entrepreneur. Traits someone like Damien can admire and respect. Traits that could have come from her husband.

  But doubt sets in. “I can’t ask him to donate his sperm. Nathan just lost his son. He’ll never go for it.”

  “Then don’t ask him.”

  Ella twists around and looks up at him, appalled. “You can’t be serious. You aren’t suggesting . . . ?” She can’t finish the sentence. Because her husband of three years has just suggested that she sleep with another man.

  “He doesn’t have to know. No one will ever know your baby isn’t mine if we don’t tell them.”

  Ella’s hands shake. She clasps them in her lap. Charming interview subjects into bed isn’t new to her. She did it with Damien when she thought she’d still write his story. But she hasn’t done it since, and none of the men she’d slept with beforehand had been an official assignment at the time. She could put her job at risk. Her marriage.

  There’s also another obstacle. A big one.

  “He’s married,” Ella points out, even though, surprisingly, she isn’t finding herself completely opposed to sleeping with Nathan. It’s an odd sensation for sure. Nathan isn’t the first man she’s been attracted to since marrying Damien. But to sleep with him? She’d be cheating on Damien, wouldn’t she?

  But is it really cheating if Damien suggested it and they get the baby they both want?